Tweaking Tweets to Help in Haiti

It's been inspiring to watch the way technologists and their technologies have played a major role in collecting, analyzing and disseminating useful information for the relief effort in Haiti. Social networking tools, and in particular Twitter, have played a big part in all of this. (To get a sense of the volume, and value, of the tweets coming in about Haiti, I invite you to check out The New York Times Haiti list, or the Breaking News list). Volunteers are helping many organizations go through, manually, all of those tweets, and then put the information into forms which aid groups on the ground will find useful.

Project EPIC (Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis), a research effort spear-headed by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of California, Irvine, has been studying the use of Twitter during crises, and they've come up with an idea for making tweets about Haiti even more useful. They're calling the campaign "Tweak the Tweet," and it proposes using a hierarchy of Twitter hashtags (see example here on the page) to make Tweets more machine readable, and if the information in the tweets could be automatically tagged, categorized, and to an extent prioritized. 

Imagine if all those volunteers trolling through tweets could get on with other needed tasks...

"We're trying to do natural language processing of tweets," says Professor Leysia Palen of the University of Colorado, "but that's a really, really difficult problem." But a machine might do better if it had some help from hashtags, the thinking goes. "And so we're trying to see if we can get the human actors to change their behavior."

So, what would these modded out Haiti tweets look like? Here's an example from the EPIC website:

EPIC has also done a version of the hashtags in French, and is working on a Creole translation as well.

But is it realistic to think that busy aid workers or desperate Haitians have the time or inclination to use EPIC's hashtag cheat-sheet?  

"I don't think that's realistic to expect that to happen," Palen told me. "But to the extent that this can help communications around the Haiti event, for those who are trying to help, that's probably where we can make the most inroads and be of the most service."

Sahana, an open source initiative that has set up a Haiti 2010 Disaster Response Portal, is in partnership with EPIC's Tweak the Tweet initiative, and is actively trying the promote the use of the hashtag system.

I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on the practicality of EPIC's idea. Any suggestions on how they can make it easier or better?